Religion is Not a Native Term

Jonathan Z. Smith famously wrote, "'Religion' is not a native term; it is a term created by scholars for their intellectual purposes and therefore is theirs to define...There can be no disciplined study of religion without such a horizon."

Religion is Not a Native Term

Author: Michael J. Altman

The American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature released a new report about the job market based on data drawn from the AAR/SBL job listings for the 2013-2014 academic year. The report builds on previous data that dates back to January 2001.

Graduate programs in religious studies and theology should hand this report to their incoming students. They should email it to everyone in their program. They should have a seminar on it for their first-year students. Make it required reading and spend an hour discussing it. Have the conversation.

Here four takeaways I got from the report.

1. We must redefine what success looks like for a Ph.D. graduate.

Generally speaking, success for a Ph.D. graduate meant a tenure-track job. On one level, that view is backed up in the report. 80% of the jobs listed in the SBL/AAR listings were tenured or tenure track positions.But when you look at who got the jobs, the numbers have an interesting ambivalence.

First off 90% of appointees completed their degree before they started their job. But what does that mean?

The first group of appointees to complete their degrees immediately prior to their start dates comprise almost one third of all appointees (32.7%). The typical candidate in this group would have interviewed in November of 2012, completed their degree in May of 2013, and started their appointment in July or August of 2013. Another 17.1% of appointees interviewed in the year that they completed their degrees, and 11.1% of appointees interviewed the year after they completed their degrees. Finally, the remaining third (34.3%) of appointees interviewed two years or more after they completed their degrees.

So, only about a third of the jobs went to people fresh out of grad school. The others all spent at least a year doing something else–either outside the academy or in some sort of “contingent” position.

@burnidge@MichaelJAltman will be interesting to watch departments transition to deemphasize R1 jobs as success. Teaching experience a must.

This is the new normal. Most Ph.D.s will spend time bouncing around various positions before they land that tenure-track job. If you don’t get a job right out of grad school you have a better chance of getting one two years or more after you graduate. Success isn’t a tenure-track job, success is a job period. And we might not even be able to measure success until you’ve been out of grad school for 5 years. Why is this?

2. Teaching experience really matters.

The organizations have gathered data on the skills and/or experiences desired or required by hiring institutions since the 2001-2002 AY (Table 17), though unfortunately data are missing for the 2008-2009, 2009-2010, and 2010-2011 academic years. Holding a Ph.D., prior teaching experience, and interdisciplinary teaching or research abilities continue to be ranked highest among the twelve options.6 A majority of institutions required (59.5%) or desired (10.6%) candidates to hold a Ph.D. Almost half of hiring institutions required (29.9%) or desired (18.1%) prior teaching experience, while over one fifth required (9.7%) or desired (12.2%) interdisciplinary teaching or research abilities.

One reason for that 34% of appointees who had been out of grad school for two years or more may be the desire for teaching experience among hiring departments. Those years between graduation and tenure-track appointment are often filled with contingent teaching. Ph.D. departments that want to produce competitive candidates should be intentionally building constructive teaching experiences and pedagogical development into their programs. This does not mean that graduate students should be overloaded with teaching a ton of courses on their own from the very beginning. “Teaching experience” can be an excuse to dump heavy teaching loads on under-prepared and over-worked graduate students. Rather, it means that teaching will be part of a broader professionalization of graduate students.

The data on “interdisciplinary research” is a red herring. As the footnote in the report smartly notes, “the date include no clear definition of ‘interdisciplinary, so the meaning may vary widely.” Indeed, “interdisciplinary” has become a vacuous buzzword in many settings. The takeaway here is not that candidates should be more “interdisciplinary” but that departments should stop putting “interdisciplinary” in their job ads as a meaningless place holder or a euphemism for “we don’t really know what we want.” Candidates should just do interesting and cutting-edge research.

3. You better be able to work in a public institution.

Two of the key findings of the study:

The number and share of positions at private not-for-profit (private) institutions in the U.S. has steadily abated since the 2010-2011 AY, while the number at public institutions has remained steady during the same period.

Mid-size, private research institutions and the smallest special focus institutions are the locus of declines, whereas the number of positions at private and public Master’s institutions has risen for the past two years.

Mid-size private research institutions, like Emory, are often the places with the best programs in religious studies. Yet, their students are more likely to end up in a public institution, like Alabama. If this trend continues and the number of positions in public institutions continue to grow while private institutions hire less, it could have important repercussions for how we do religious studies. What I do here at Alabama, for instance, looks very different from what many of my colleagues do at private seminaries and religious colleges. More jobs at public institutions means that candidates who approach religious studies as an academic discipline within the secular public university will have better chance at a job. That will have an impact on what directions our field goes methodological and theoretically.

UPDATE: 11/18/14 12:27PM

A friend posted a smart critique of takeaways 1 and 3:

“I’m not comfortable with the way you’ve phrased takeaway #1 or #3: you continue to maintain the very unhelpful status quo idea of “success” as a teaching position. You revise expectations “downward,” I suppose, but you don’t look outside of teaching at the college level as any form of “success.” I think this expected outcome, and the way that graduate programs indoctrinate students into this form of reproduction, is one of the most myopic and harmful aspects of PhD programs in our discipline. We need an entirely different kind of subject formation that has a wider vision of “successful” outcomes.”

I agree that we have to broaden outcomes beyond just teaching positions. However, this report has nothing to say about that. One takeaway then, is that a report like this is too narrow to address the larger question of what counts as success for a Ph.D. graduate.

4. Course load data is useless.

My biggest critique of the report is that it relies on course load data to measure the teaching work positions require.

This course load data shows that contingent faculty are teaching more than their tenured and tenure-track peers but it doesn’t tell us how many students any of these groups are teaching. Rather than measure course load, it would be more useful to also measure credit hour production. Are those six courses taught by contingent faculty filled with 100 students, while the tenured have four and a half seminars of 15 students? We don’t know. Course load doesn’t tell us who is really making the donuts in the department. For example, I had a 4/4 course load last year as a contingent instructor but I only had a total of about 100 students. Meanwhile, one section of introduction to religious studies taught by a tenured faculty member had 150 students on its own. See, credit hours and enrollment matter.

I’m lucky.

My own personal takeaway from the report is that I am both lucky and typical. I am incredibly lucky to have gotten a job in a year when job listings were down. I am incredibly typical because it took a year of heavy teaching as a contingent faculty member to gain teaching experience that made me a strong candidate.

I was recently listening to the Digital Campus podcast when they did a segment (skip to 38:03 mark) discussing the need, or lack thereof, for the conference job interview. They based the discussion on the recent column from Rosemary Feal, the Executive Director of the Modern Language Association. Feal makes some really interesting points in the column that I hope other academic societies, such as the AAR can pick up on.

First, Feal argues that the MLA offers interview services because departments want them. Furthermore, she notes that the MLA has no vested interest in the status quo.

Some writers think the MLA has a vested interest in defending the current system, but that is simply wrong. The MLA operates under the assumption that the interests of both candidates and departments must be well served. At times, however, those interests conflict. Cost is a major obstacle for candidates when it comes to attending the MLA convention. Although the MLA has doubled the amount of travel grants in recent years (from $200 to $400) and although every qualified applicant has received one, the expenses involved in attending the convention can be prohibitive to the graduate student or part-time faculty member who may have one interview lined up. This is a huge burden on the candidate, and departments need to adjust their expectations.

I think Feal is right here. As I argued, the cost of interviews at conferences are prohibitive. Feal encourages departments to consider remote conferencing systems and even notes that there are guidelines for doing remote interviews provided by scholarly societies.

Feal also rightly points out that graduate programs have a duty to their students.

Graduate programs have a responsibility to their students. To maintain a PhD program in these difficult times means committing the resources to support students in their nascent careers, whether in academia or beyond. Students should expect extensive assistance in preparing for the job search and in meeting the costs of attending the convention. After all, the MLA convention is much more than an event where interviews occur. It remains the largest language and literature convention in the world, and it offers nearly eight hundred sessions, professional development workshops, networking opportunities, and a host of other activities. Being on the job market is extraordinarily stressful, but there’s a whole convention out there that offers intellectual and professional engagement of a very different type.

I think Feal’s point here is crucial. In my experience, professionalization has meant “preparation for a job” instead of “preparation for a career.” Thus, graduate students see the conference as a place for job hunting and miss out on the larger experience of the conference and all it has to offer. I cannot wait to go to the AAR this year and not be on the job market precisely because I feel like I finally get to go to the whole conference and not just that depressing part with the cubicles. I haven’t been able to do that since my first couple years as a grad student.

I hope the AAR is paying attention to what the MLA is doing because I feel like they are on to something here:

It’s time for us to reconsider how and where we interview and to look to the convention as a renewable source of intellectual energy, created by and for MLA members…Contrary to what I’ve heard being said, the MLA does not count on the convention as a major source of association revenue, unlike other scholarly associations. Our fees are among the lowest, while we provide more services than most.

Side note: How does this compare to the AAR?

It’s an exciting, rich occasion for intellectual, pedagogical, and professional exchange. The convention exists to serve members, and as long as the structures that undergird it are supporting that mission, they should remain. The MLA has no interest in forcing an interview model on the profession if it no longer works. Quite the opposite: the MLA has every interest in documenting and promoting best practices, recognizing that there are many. What if departments always offered candidates the option of a remote interview and treated candidates equally whether or not they planned to attend the MLA convention? Some departments have already adopted this practice, and it sounds wise to me. I very much enjoy seeing graduate students at the convention, hearing their presentations, and meeting them informally. It would be in all of our best interests to make the convention a less tense and burdensome experience for the next generation of the humanities workforce.

I think we can all agree that the conference should be less burdensome. I think we all want a conference that is a “rich occasion for intellectual, pedagogical, and professional exchange.” It should be that way for everyone.

Like this:

Below is a response I received to my last post calling for an end to the conference interview and the Employment Center at the AAR Annual Meeting. It comes from Ryan Woods, a graduate school colleague of mine and currently the Associate Director of Employment Services at the AAR. I post it here with his permission.

Disclaimer: what follows represents my own opinions, and in no way represents any official positions adopted by AAR/SBL.

Dear Mike,

As the Associate Director of Employment Services at the American Academy of Religion, I read your post with great interest. As a veteran job seeker, I sympathize with many of complaints you ventilate. The onerous costs that candidates must assume to interview at the Annual Meetings represent a moral quandary. Your suggestions for reducing these burdens deserve careful consideration as AAR seeks more effective and equitable ways to serve our constituents. However, to make meaningful improvements, we need to disentangle problematic AAR policies from the larger landscape of employment practices in higher education. In particular, progress depends on distinguishing systemic issues from those specifically generated by Employment Services and recognizing the limits of reforming measures.

It is a travesty that, as you observe, “the constituency within the AAR with the least resources, the least funding, and the least institutional support is required to attend the annual meeting with no promise that it is even worth their while.” Indeed, I read an article just this morning that inventoried the high costs of attending the Annual Meetings, and the Chronicle recently ran a feature on how the exorbitant fees of attending a professional meeting of sociologists had deterred members from participating. Another blogger advanced a spirited proposition to abandon conference interviews altogether. Horror stories of unsupported graduate students and penniless adjuncts maxing out credit cards in the faint hope of securing a position on the tenure track have become staples in this literature. But their narratives no longer occupy the periphery; they have come to be emblematic of the bleak realities that a growing population of candidates faces.

I know these difficult circumstances from personal experience. Last year, I was on the market for a second year. Marginally employed, I was not planning to deliver a paper or participate in a panel at the Annual Meeting. Because I had defended my dissertation earlier that spring, I was no longer receiving institutional support to attend conferences. The later I waited to register and make travel reservations, the higher the prices climbed. Financial exigency finally made the cost prohibitive. Consequently, I decided against renewing my membership or registering for the Annual Meeting. Just three days before the Annual Meeting, an employer contacted me for an interview. I informed him that I was no longer planning to travel to Baltimore, but could arrange to meet on campus for a preliminary interview (fortunately, the campus was conveniently located less than an hour from my parents’ house). We convened shortly after Thanksgiving weekend on a windy, leaf-strewn Midwestern campus for a half-hour interview. A few months passed, and then the search chair rang again, this time to inform me that I was a finalist for the opening. In the end, I wasn’t offered the position. But in the process, I came to appreciate the sober calculations that many job seekers and institutions are making this time of year. Given these challenges, many rational actors – like myself – will select from among the products offered by the AAR based on both fiscal and practical considerations. An increasing number of both employers and candidates may choose to arrange interviews outside the Annual Meeting.

In the light of these experiences, I think we should reframe the discussion. AAR and SBL are not so much “charging admission” (since one is not formally required to purchase any of their products) as offering a range of services from which students can select. To understand how and why students select from among these options, it is useful to distinguish the various services offered to employment candidates. There is membership, first of all, which entitles one to view employment listings. Because most tenure-track offerings in the field are advertised on the auxiliary employment website (although it is noteworthy that academic job wikis have eroded this monopoly to an extent), this is a valuable service for job seekers. Membership costs $55 for both graduate students and those who make less than $20,000. This is comparable to dues assessed by peer societies such as the American Philosophical Association or the American Historical Association. To interview onsite at the Annual Meeting, one has to be there. That means that candidates must register for the Annual Meeting, make travel plans, and reserve lodgings. These procedures are connected, since the AAR and SBL negotiate discounted hotel rates based on the number of registrations they have in hand. The size and timing of the registration cohort therefore determines cost. Consequently, the longer a candidate waits to register, the higher the charges rise, for the same reasons that hotel costs and flights tend to increase the longer one waits to make reservations. Finally, for a fee of $25, candidates may register with the Employment Center, which allows them to post their credentials online for employer review and communicate confidentially with employers. None of these services is required, and the first two services (membership and registration for the Annual Meeting) are not exclusively associated with the Employment Center. This invites selective consumption. One might become a member, for example, but choose not to attend the Annual Meeting, arranging for Skype interviews. Alternatively, a member might attend the Annual Meeting but choose not to register with the Employment Center. To be sure, each decision has consequences. Not renewing one’s membership means missing out on other membership benefits as well as potentially missing a job listing. Missing the Annual Meeting entails foregoing opportunities for networking and scholarly conversation as well as interviewing in person. A member who doesn’t register for the Employment Center forecloses on an avenue for exposure: a potential employer might review her credentials and request an interview onsite. As with deciding whether to attend a job fair in a distant city, these deliberations will always involve an aleatory element. Many calculations must be made well in advance of the meeting, with limited resources, and without assurance that these investments will pay dividends.

Given the costs associated with conference interviewing, one begins to wonder why constituents continue to pay for any of these services. If the logic is so irresistible – if “moving candidates to a central location is wasteful, foolish, unnecessary, and [sic] puts an undue burden on job seekers” – then why don’t more candidates and employers embargo the Annual Meetings? For that matter, why do employers at all learned societies continue to host interviews at their annual meetings and conferences in the age of Google Hangouts? In a time when universities are increasingly wary of their bottom lines, withdrawing from the Employment Center would seem an obvious means of saving money. Candidates could likewise circumvent the costs and game the system by cutting out the intermediaries and communicating directly with prospective employers. Although the inertia of tradition might influence the continued demand for centralized interviewing, it seems inadequate to explain why employers cling to pipe-and-drapes cubicles. Likewise, the observation that “hope springs eternal” seems not to cast much light on candidates’ behavior. Candidates are as aware as anyone of their meager prospects as they populate the flickering pixels of registration forms with their Visa card accounts.

The reason, I think, lies in the intangible benefits afforded by attendance and participation in the Annual Meetings. Employers and candidates prefer to exchange ideas and interview in person at a central location for the some of the same reasons they prefer to teach in person rather than online. Delivering a paper, networking with other candidates and employers, attending employment workshops – all these benefits are hard to communicate virtually. An employer can’t catch a candidate’s presentation if the candidate isn’t attending. Employment seekers like to ask colleagues at a university reception about departmental ethos or gossip about the search chair’s previous appointment with a recent acquaintance from a panel discussion. Most candidates and employers agree that viva voce interviews provide better venues for assessing the “fit” between institutional needs and candidate dispositions than mediated conversations. And as long as employers are attending the Annual Meetings on the university’s dime, it’s convenient for them. So long as those preferences exist, there will always be some demand for onsite interviews.

You maintain that AAR should stop paywalling the advertisements, dismantle the Employment Center at the Annual Meetings, and – failing those two prescriptions – waive registration fees for students and recent graduates (within the past two years). The first proposal has been under discussion for a while. Some other learned societies (such as APA and MLA) do not make membership a prerequisite for viewing employment listings; others (such as AHA) do. To be clear, though, the question is more complicated than just freeing the advertisements. Membership confers privileges aside from access to employment listings. We think it is valuable for anyone in the field of religious studies – not just job seekers – to be affiliated with AAR/SBL, for reasons that transcend the search for employment. But we might be able to do more. A colleague recently floated the “drug dealer” model of membership for graduate students in their first year of studies: for this trial period, one’s membership is free, followed by the resumption of a normal fee structure. It might be useful to waive membership fees as a “graduation present” to newly minted PhDs. Perhaps AAR could further discount the student rate, and lower the corresponding dues for the lowest income bracket in our membership. Personally, I would consider jettisoning the Candidate Registration fee ($25) and make it a membership privilege. The other two prescriptions are less feasible. As long as employers and candidates prefer to attend annual meetings and interview in person, the Employment Center is here to stay. Moreover, there are some advantages to retaining a centralized apparatus with standardized policies and reserved spaces for interviewing. If you’re going to have onsite interviews, the best protection against intoxicated committee members questioning candidates in bedroom suites is to provide a public venue governed by a single code of conduct. Still, it might be worthwhile to consider levelling the playing field for virtual interviewers by providing Skype services in the interview booths. Suspending registration fees for the Annual Meeting is the least negotiable proposition. Because registrations for the Annual Meeting give the AAR bargaining power with hotels and convention centers, waiving these fees might end up costing candidates even more in the larger picture. Even here, though, perhaps we could consider adjusting the financial incentives to be less punitive or discounting registration rates to candidates. It would be worth scrutinizing.

Much of this depressing state of affairs lies beyond the scope of AAR’s purview and capacity to change. As you know well, an anemic job market is not unique to the field of religious studies. In fact, it is much worse in other disciplines. A disproportionate number of candidates vying for a dwindling number of full-time positions means intense competition. Institutional bureaucracy and sclerotic hiring procedures extend timelines for contacting candidates, disadvantaging them in the registration process. Employers sometimes insist on personal meetings, or treat virtual interviewers as second-class. Although AAR cannot turn back the tide of these changes in employment practices, we can listen to our constituents and continually reassess our services in view of their needs. Perhaps we can consider reducing some fees for candidates, or collapsing some services into others. We can offer more useful employment workshops. Maybe we can provide financial incentives to encourage institutions to contact candidates earlier, to assume some of the costs of candidates being onsite, or to offer greater consideration for those who cannot interview onsite. But we can only help to improve the experience of job seekers if members and institutions demand it and participate in the process of reform.

Thanks for opening the conversation with your article. It’s a timely issue to consider. But weighty problems are best discussed over drinks at an AAR reception. See you in San Diego, I hope.

Over the weekend I noticed some posts in my Facebook timeline from friends and colleagues who are on the job market about the upcoming American Academy of Religion meeting in San Diego. One person was lamenting the $500 she spent out of her pocket for a plane ticket to a conference where she wasn’t even sure she’d have any job interviews. Another was asking when he should arrive in order to be there the right days for any interviews he might get. So, here are two young scholars, not yet on the tenure track, trying to find the time and money to attend a conference for imaginary job interviews they don’t even know about yet. This makes absolutely no sense. The constituency within the AAR with the least resources, the least funding, and the least institutional support is required to attend the annual meeting with no promise that it is even worth their while.

I had the privilege of landing a tenure-track job in my second year on the job market. I was fortunate. But both those years, I did not hear about job interviews at the AAR until a week or so before the conference. Luckily, I was already planning to go because I was presenting papers and involved with programming. Luckily, I had institutional funding to go. But what if I didn’t? What would have happened if I told a search committee chair on the phone, “I won’t be at the AAR, but I’d be happy to interview over Skype?”

Look at the conference fees and the membership dues for the AAR. Even if they register in May (for imaginary November interviews) student candidates will have to pay $140 in registration and membership fees. Someone who has finished their Ph.D. but is still looking for a tenure-track job would pay at least $210 and up to $465 depending on what they make in their non-TT position. These non-TT members are the one’s who are least likely to have funding. On top of these fees you also have to add in travel and hotel costs for an imaginary interview you don’t even know you’ll really ever have.

Why do we charge an admission fee for a job interview?

At the heart of this ridiculousness sits the AAR/SBL Employment Center. There are two sides to the Employment Center. First, there’s the digital side. These are the job listings that departments pay to have listed. They are only available to AAR members who have paid the membership dues. For an extra $25 ($50 if you do it on-site) candidates can also submit their C.V. to a database, get a sweet printout of the job listings at the conference, and communicate with search committees through an arcane messaging system. I paid to register for this twice and I think it was totally worthless. The other side of the Employment Center is physical. It’s a place. A place deep in the bowels of a conference center. It is a large ballroom divided into cubicles for interviews and a bullpen for candidates to wait until someone emerges and calls their name. It is the most depressing place on Earth. It is unnecessary. The Employment Center is a wast of resources. Rather than force candidates to travel to the national meeting, search committees should take advantage of Skype or one of the many other options for conducting video interviews. Moving job candidates to a central location is wasteful, foolish, unnecessary, and puts an undue burden on job seekers. The constituents of the American Academy of Religion do not need the Employment Center. It is a matchmaker in the time of Tinder.

So, all of that said, what should the AAR do for candidates? Here are two things.

1. Get rid of the Employment Center

2. Take the Employment Listings out from behind the paywall. Free the jobs!

If the AAR can’t do these two things, then it has an obligation to do something else:

No conference registration fees for students and recent Ph.D.s (within the past 2 years).

Students make up about a third of the AAR membership, according to the AAR. I don’t know how much of the meeting attendees they make up but I’d guess a lot. Nonetheless, it’s time to get rid of the $200 handshake. If the AAR won’t stop the conference interview then it should at least make them cheap–as in free. I’m not the first to recommend something along these lines. When you get that phone call from a search committee chair saying, “We’d love to speak with you about our position.” You’re reaction shouldn’t be “How the hell will I pay for that?” It should be:

UPDATE 2:48 pm 10/20: I’ve gotten a lot of feedback that I’ve low balled the costs. It’s not just a $200 handshake. This is true. I went with 200 bucks anticipating a “REAL scholars always go to the meeting anyway” response from those defending the status quo. Philip Tite has a great breakdown of the full cost. He sets the minimum at $1525 and the max at over $2400.

A constructivists’ criticisms are obviously true and we know this already and we’ve already incorporated them into our work and so all this is old news

Step two: Assert that the constructivist is wrong.

These criticisms are obviously false because they misrepresent how real people (ie., not academics) understand religion themselves

Step three: Assert that it doesn’t matter.

It doesn’t matter whether these criticisms are true or false because we’re just going to do what we’ve been doing anyway and so all this critique amounts to is time-wasting navel gazing that distracts us from doing the real work that we’ve already decided to do. For this last reason, deconstructive critiques that tell us that work in religious studies is analytically incoherent are not helpful because they might prevent scholars of religion from doing the analytically incoherent work that we will inevitably do because, hey, no one’s perfect.

Like this:

I’m working on a review essay that covers the various academic podcasts about religion and religious studies that have appeared in the past few years. I’m limiting myself to academic podcasts, or at least podcasts that feature academics. So, I’m not including things like Interfaith Voices or On Being. I am interested in podcasts not necessarily in religious studies but that have scholars discussing religion, such as the Junto Podcasts. Here’s a list of what I have so far.

What am I missing?

Let me know in the comments or on Twitter/Facebook/Morse code/carrier pigeon/YO.

What is the relationship between spelling and theory? I often tell people my research is about “Hinduism in nineteenth century America.” But it’s really not. It’s not about Hinduism at all. It can’t be because the idea of “Hinduism,” a world religion comparable to other world religions, isn’t invented until the late nineteenth century. That’s kind of the point of my research. Most other scholars writing about this period will still use the term “Hindu” to describe the people that Americans or Britons were describing during this period. But when an American missionary or Unitarian pastor refered to the people in India doing something that they recognize as religion they most often used the term “Hindoo.” Hindoo–that double O of colonialism.

So, here’s the question: Is the difference between Hindoo and Hindu just a matter of spelling? Or is there more going on here?

On the one hand, you could argue that though the sources read Hindoo, it makes sense for the scholar today to write Hindu, even when talking about the 1820s. There are all sorts of terms that we alter when we bring them into the present from the past. No one puts the long S in their scholarly prose, for example. So, maybe Hindoo to Hindu is just like taking that long s out of Congress in the Bill of Rights?

The long s in “Congress” from the Bill of Rights

But maybe it’s not. It seems to me a Hindu is actually someone quite different from a Hindoo. That is, a Hindu is someone tied up with this world religion called Hinduism. There is the Hindu American Foundation, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (or World Hindu Council), and the Pew Research Center tallies up the number of “Hindus” in America. But in the early nineteenth century, a Hindoo was a product of the American and British imagination. When I discuss what Americans thought about India and the people who lived there and these things they did that Americans thought were religion, I am not talking about people in South Asia. I’m talking about representations of people in South Asia. These Hindoos are imaginary. “Hindoos” and their religion were invented by Europeans and Americans. During this period, people in India did not present themselves to an American audience. Rather, they were represented by American and European authors to an American audience and in that process they were represented as Hindoos.

Perhaps the one exception to this would be the Indian reformer Rammohun Roy who wrote in English to an American and British audience. However, Roy self-identified as a “Hindoo,” as in his work “A Defence of Hindoo Theism.”Even as late as the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions, Americans represented Swami Vivekananda, the South Asian who garnered an audience throughout America, as a “Hindoo Monk.” Vivekananda and Rammohun Roy served as transitional figures as Hindoos became Hindus. That is, as South Asians went from imagined representations to immigrants representing themselves in American culture. In 1893 Vivekananda was a “Hindoo monk” but by 1930 he is part of a “Hindu Movement” in Wendell Thomas’s book Hinduism Invades America. Vivekananda goes from Hindoo to Hindu, from a South Asian represented by Americans in Chicago to the founder of a movement representing itself in America.

Here’s the shift from Hindoo to Hindu in one handy Ngram. The lines cross in the year 1884:

For most of my brief career I’ve fallen back on the term “Hindu religions” to describe whatever it was that Americans and the British were trying to describe in their writing. But I’ve decided to eject that term from my work going forward because it implies that there is something there that is essentially “Hindu” before someone labels it as such. There is no there there, however. There is only the discourse about whatever people in South Asia seem to be doing to Europeans and Americans. So, I’m going back to Hindoo, colonial Os and all, to emphasize that nothing is “Hindu” or “Hindoo” until someone categorizes it as such. And then, once categorized, my job is to unpack the conflicts, arguments, ideologies, claims, and competitions behind that categorization. But I am curious to hear from others on this question–and similar questions about, say, “evangelical” or other such categories. Is this all simply a word game?